Removal of confederate statues

[thesoretoothsayer]

You all didn't really think that it would just end with a few statues, did you?
Gone with the Wind pulled from a Memphis Theatre:

https://www.yahoo.com/tv/gone-wind-pulled-memphis-theatre-022619407.html

[Pa Marmo]

[Mugwump]

Read "The book of laughter and forgetting" by Milan Kundera, or "Darkness at Noon" by Koestler. Or 1984, or Animal Farm.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

[David]

I think we can reasonably trust Americans to never take a cautious or measured approach to anything.

[Mugwump]

^ true, but equally, experience teaches that we can expect the Australian Left to mindlessly ape the "thought leadership" they get from that very excess.

[watt price tully]

No doubt it is a racist film in may respects, but quite frankly my dear, I don't give damn in terms of the issues going around to be concerned about.

However, if you showed the black & white minstrels ....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_and_White_Minstrel_Show

[Pies4shaw]

I think we should tear down every Confederate monument in Melbourne, too. Solidarity.

[regan is true fullback]

The great Connor Cruise O'Brien compared the Orangemen of the North with the Catholic spokesmen of the South in Ireland as the difference between yelping dogs and purring cats...

In the American Right context, Trump and his Neo Nazi friends are the yelping dogs - our privileges are being taken away! we bite! we bite! we bite!

But where are the purring cats?

Introducing Shelby Foote, lovely bloke, historian, star of Ken Burns' Civil War, the show that changed documentary television. and possibly one of the most dangerous men in America.

Foote is a great R.E.Lee fan, fair enough, the guy was a brilliant general, but where it gets murky is when he starts praising one Nathan Bedford Forrest as a similar genius and tactician for the Noble South. Forrest, this recipient of many statues, is the founder of the KKK, and the inspiration for that wonderful film, Birth of a Nation, written by a Klansman. And to make this story even more weird, the man who first brought the public's attention to this piece of garbage way back in the '60s is one William Cosby...

Back to Shelby Foote. As well as explaining why the South has this sense of defeat, and therefore resentment, unshared by the rest of the USA, he also has this cat like way of explaining that the Pre Bellum South wasn't so bad after all, and everyone got along.

There have been many Birth of a Nations - The Santa Fe Trail, Song of the South, The Dukes of Hazzard, and my personal favourite, really, The Outlaw Josie Wales.

Anyway, it's all in the past, and Emmett Til, Hattie Carroll and Medgar Evers say hi. Oh yeah, the right side won but, but let's not mention the war...